Warning: contains spoilers
I am a member of a very exclusive club. It doesn't have a clubhouse, a bar, a smoking room, or even a membership list. But it's a band of people who happened to come together between the 24th December 2007 and 2nd February 2008 to see Jessie Wallace perform the role of Maureen for the West End rewrite of Jonathan Larson's classic, at the then Duke of York Theatre, to see RENT: Remixed. With a capacity of 640 seats and a 57-performance run, this club can only ever have a very maximum of 36,480 members. There is an associated club of people who went before the EastEnders actress took on the role, following the withdrawal of Denise Van Outen after just two months, which can claim a slightly larger membership. As you will have gathered from its short run, the show wasn't really a success; information about it is relatively hard to come by, save for a Reddit thread that holds an almost certainly bootleg copy of the cast soundtrack recordings, and a handful of articles asking if anyone else remembers it even happening. The cast sheet sounds a little more impressive today; at the time of Luke Evans' portrayal of Roger, he had only a handful of film credits. Mimi was played by Siobhan Donaghy during a Sugababes hiatus. Set in contemporary Britain, with a mixture of East Coast American and East End London accents, it was an attempt to bring this tale of where the AIDS crisis collides with capitalism to a 2000s audience that was already beginning to forget. Alas, the critics panned the production, the show itself canned, and it was decided never to speak of the project ever again.
So when news broke that a more faithful production of RENT was set to hit the West End in 2026, I was delighted that I might get the chance to see it done properly. Now, I need to say, that I am actually much more familiar with the original 1998 West End run than a millennial of my age really ought to be. With a step-dad on the payroll at the Shaftesbury Theatre, in the era before it was unacceptable to simply take your kids with you to work during the school holidays, I have patchy but vivid memories of the summer of RENT's West End debut as a nine-year-old, even if I wasn't fully aware of the extent of the tail end of the AIDS crisis that I was growing up in. My parents, like many others at the time, shielded me from the horrors until I was a bit older. It was many years later before my mother could bring herself to talk about the terrifying period in which she was told to stay in her flat without contact with anyone, while doctors of the time tried to work out why so many of her friends and colleagues were dying of, what was described in the initial months as, a 'gay cancer'.
Perhaps this ever-so-slightly closer proximity to the events of the crisis makes me a little more impassioned to write what I'm about to share with you.